#26: a lifestyle

Dear Readers:

You will receive an email from me each month containing one boredom, one horror, and one glory. This is the twenty-sixth one.

Boredom. Robert A. Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson are not books; they are a lifestyle. I adopted this lifestyle sometime during the dark and scary winter. Every night at 6:15 I opened my computer again to stare at it with glassy eyes after a long day of some approximation of full-time childcare and full-time teaching, already having eaten a huge dinner very, very quickly and then worked as part of an expert team with Brian to put Bea to bed. Canvas, the “learning management system,” was open in one window and a terrible article in New York Magazine, Slate, or The New York Times was open in another, and I toggled between them without making headway in the “Speedgrader” or on the article. After about two hours, I would remember that if I could gin up the energy to go to bed, LBJ was there waiting for me. That soon, I would be back in the warm sea of Caro’s workmanlike prose: ah.

Horror. I don’t know why it is exhilarating to read about all the different ways our country has fallen apart before, or why it’s kind of comforting to read about how hard life has been for people in this country. This country has already ended, many times over. This experiment in democracy is a disaster.

In the first book of the series (which is consists of four volumes, more than 3,000 pages so far, with one more to come), The Path to Power, we learn how hard life was in Texas Hill Country, where LBJ was born and raised, in the darkness. It was especially hard for women because do anything in the house, you had to haul water and wood. The average farm wife hauled about 300 tons of water 1,730 miles each year. It changed the shape of their bodies (“You see how round-shouldered I am?” an old woman of Hill Country says). All summer, you canned maniacally, over the hot fire, so your family would be able to eat throughout the year. When you did laundry, you basically had to be a washing machine, to do all the things that washing machines do, but you were a woman, not a machine. (LBJ’s cousin says, “of all the things of my life that I will never forget, I will never forget how much my back hurt on washdays.”) In the evening, if you wanted to read and relax after a long, arduous day, you probably couldn’t, because the kerosene to light the reading lamp was too expensive—and even if you could afford it, it was very difficult to control. “Living—just living—was a problem,” said a Hill Country woman. This is the dark, hard world that FDR electrified in the 1930s.  

Glory. When someone writes a biography of Robert Caro, they should call it Research. That is Caro’s genius. He’s not good at putting together a narrative or at explaining complex legislative maneuvers. I don’t find his assessments of LBJ’s character convincing. He doesn’t zero in on what’s interesting—he spends less than two pages in Master of the Senate (the third one) about LBJ’s extramarital affair with Helen Gahagan Douglas, A FELLOW CONGRESSPERSON! THEY REGULARLY ARRIVED TOGETHER ON CAPITOL HILL IN THE MORNING AND WALKED TO HIS OFFICE HOLDING HANDS.

But he’s an absolutely brilliant researcher. Tiny, tiny details that must have taken weeks to chase down are tucked into every page of this book, and they make the past into something you can taste, feel, see, hear, and know. LBJ used a “wristwatch alarm” to remind himself of calls he needed to make throughout the day when he was home in Hill Country recovering from a major heart attack. A waiter who brought “sandwiches and coffee” to Bobby Baker and LBJ in the Senate Dining Room at the first lunch they ever had together recalls the “rapport” that formed. How, why, did Caro think to find that waiter? A lawyer in Austin was sitting in the office of Alvin Wirtz (one of multiple Dick Cheney-like figures in LBJ’s career) in 1949, when LBJ happened to call. The lawyer recalls to Caro Wirtz’s directive end of the half-hour phone conversation. How, why, did Caro think to find that lawyer?!

These details (sorry, but) electrify Caro’s characters. The “Phi Beta Kappa key dangling ostentatiously from a gold chain” on Hubert Humphrey’s vest, his Mayor Pete-like arrival on the scene (the “glib, jaunty spellbinder with a ‘listen-you-guys’ approach” per Time).  This is especially true for the legendary characters we come to know: the heroic Coke Stevenson, the tragic Sam Rayburn, the evil Herman Brown, the viper VP John Nance Garner, the repulsive Pappy O’Daniel. But true, too, for the more familiar minor characters, who flit across the stage of these books—Prescott Bush, Roy Cohn, RFK, Mary McLeod Bethune, Albert Gore, Sr., Paul Douglas, Eleanor Roosevelt…

At the beginning of the pandemic, I was afraid that the pandemic was all anyone in the future would ever say about us. That Oh, that was during the covid pandemic would be an explanation for anything that happened politically, socially, globally, during our entire lives. I was worried we’d be dispatched with in a sentence: they lived/died during the covid pandemic. That seemed a fate worse than death—or actually, a kind of death in itself, that our whole, real lives would be erased by the hugeness of this one thing. The Years of Lyndon Johnson gives air, space, detail, to all these different kinds of people who lived during the first century of world wars, to quote Muriel Rukeyser—Coke Stevenson throwing up his arms in joy at the end of his life, Ava Cox’s back permanently bent from laundry days. Caro gives them what we all deserve in the history we read and the history we are: humanity.

Sincerely,

Lucy